Wheelman Demo Wheels It's Way Into My Heart

At the same time as I download the new Burnout Toy Cars pack, I noticed the Wheelman demo was released and decided to giive it a spin. Vin Diesel can apparently make good games (google: Escape from Butcher Bay) so does he do it again?

In Wheelman, you play as Vinny himself (or the character he plays anyways) who is a driver for hire apparently in high risk crime and stunts. The game starts right off with you female client coming out of a building with alarms ringing, where you then pick her up and a chase ensues.

"My name is Riddick... I mean Vin"

The physics are fairly arcade like. Drifting by carefully braking during turns feel floaty and easy to manage. It's pretty hard to over or understeer, so the margin of error is forgiving. The police are right on you, and later in the demo, you learn to pull out your gun, but this is where Wheelman becomes something absurdly awesome.

Instead of actually steering your car to side swipe other cars, pushing the right stick actually sends your car sideways into your would-be chasers. As the game puts it, "your car is your weapon."

Your car is your weapon. Just remember you're in your weapon.

As you wreck them, the camera changes dramatically to display their heaping wreakage just like Burnout. It's pretty cheesy though, as the cars literally fly through the air like the Hot Wheels from our old days. At least in Burnout the cars will flip and wreck with a little more weight and realism.

You also get a bar for focus moves that fills after drifts and stunts. The bar is used for your traditional boost but also crazy moves like bullet time shooting (slowing down to time to shoot a timely target) and the cyclone move (just like bullet time but you automatically spin backwards to shoot targets behind you).

The last thing I did was a side mission introduced after escaping the cops and another gang. The wild thing they introduce is the crazy car to car jump and steal. The goal was to steal a car and bring it back to the appointed location for money. Unlike GTA though, these cars seem to always outpace you. So what's a wheelman to do? Well, why not jump out of your freak'in car, land on theirs, and kick the driver out. Holy hell, this takes the middleman out of the old GTA completely!

pictures coutesy of IGN.com and MTBS